Lenovo Hires Ex-Acer CEO Lanci To Boost Consumer PC Business

In a statement issued Friday, Lenovo said Lanci will concentrate on the integration of German PC company Medion AG, which Lenovo acquired in June in a cash and stock deal valued at around $670 million.

Lanci, who is based in Italy, will work with Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang and the rest of the company's executive leadership to boost Lenovo's consumer presence and channels in Western Europe. "As a consultant to us, Gianfranco brings years of expertise and insights to Lenovo that will help us strengthen our growing global consumer business," Yang said in a statement.

During his six-year tenure at Acer, Lanci gained widespread respect in system builder channel and was credited for leading Acer into the position it held in 2009 as the world’s number two notebook maker. But Lanci resigned from Acer in March after an impasse with the company’s board.

Later, it emerged that Lanci and Acer's board didn’t agree on how to go about building engineering talent to tackle the global PC market.

"The real major issue was doing that in Taiwan, this was not possible,” Lanci told AllThingsD in May. "We needed to go outside Taiwan, be it China or India or even the U.S. or Europe, wherever you can find software resources, software know-how."

In July, rumors swirled that Lanci was planning to join Samsung in a management role for the company's European channel sales.

Medion is Lenovo's biggest acquisition since 2004, when it acquired IBM's PC business for $1.25 billion. Lenovo expects the Medion deal to double its market share in Germany and enable it to gain 7.5 percent of the Western European PC market.

Lenovo, which is currently the world's third largest PC maker, says it has been the fastest growing major PC vendor over the last seven quarters, shipping in excess of 10 million units during its recent fiscal first quarter. Earlier this month, Lenovo chairman Liu Chuanzhi said he expects the company to overtake Dell for the number two spot in global PC market share by year's end.

Rory Read, Lenovo president and COO, left the company last month to take the CEO position at AMD.